Global Food Spending

In my experience, when the topic of so-called "health food" (which we used to just call food) arises, one of the most common objections relates to price. People say, "But it is soooo much more expensive!" Compared to a 99 cent cheeseburger at a drive through, I suppose paying a few extra cents for a locally grown strawberry and without much knowledge of the externalized costs of that cheeseburger could be a turn off. So I like to re-frame spending and remind folks of what the graph above points out: It only seems expensive because we have had the option and become accustomed to spending a very small percentage of our incomes on food. How many televisions (aka non-essential items) do you have in your house and how much do you spend a month on cable? The tiny additional cost of that local strawberry seems much more reasonable, right? Not to mention you are supporting local and reducing your own footprint.

The global food map, available with interactive features and a great accompanying article on the Civil Eats website, was designed by Natalie Jones, a graduate student at UC Berkeley. It reveals that we Americans spend less of our income on food than any other country that keeps such data. Wowzers.

Using More Than Our Share

Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff Project is getting lots of attention lately and we here at JustSaying LOVE IT. Sure, they're a little reminiscent of a UPS commercial and Annie works hard to speak in a language and tone understandable by all ages (AKA kids) but considering this blogger learned that plastic comes from oil via a children's book, we're tipping our hats to Annie and recommending her videos to our readers young and old. Even if you have read every book on our recommended list and every post to date, you will learn something from these videos and be moved to consume less (or feel like a total sucker). Check it out:

Great Data on American Food Consumption

The USDA's Economic Resource Service has gathered and published some fascinating data about America's food consumption. Nothing too shocking about these graphs but really interesting stuff. The article in Amber Waves that accompanies these graphs offers a great understanding of the technological, political, social and economic forces affecting food availability over the past century (in fewer words than so many books on the subject).

this is rare...

...I disagree with the TierneyLab.

In his most recent post, John Tierney shared his thoughts on the West Virginia school teacher who encouraged/supported her second-grade students to fight to keep their schools recycling program alive. Those thoughts are that this was wasteful and that they should have been doing something more profound with that time. I'm not kidding. He feels they should be learning "about markets and about the long-term tendency of prices of natural resources to fall while the cost of people’s time rises."

He goes on:

"Instead, the students are being taught that saving resources is more important than saving human time, and that recycling is such a righteous activity that it deserves to continue even when it costs money and time to do it. That may be a popular belief, but that’s all it is, a belief. I’ve always thought of recycling as essentially a religious sacrament –a fine activity if pursued voluntarily, but not something that should be mandated or taught in public schools."

Okay kids, true or false:

Saving human time is more important than saving resources ___
Recycling is only for the righteous ___
If you believe in recycling you can bet you're to blame for this sh*t economy ___

Check out the entire post here. I encourage you to read the comments in response to the post as well. I understand and admire the bigger argument that is going on here but... we are talking about second-graders... I'm pretty sure they are around seven years old... just saying...

From Green.view

Another article from The Economist about the obstacles that stand in the way of the great green fix. Here's an excerpt:

The foremost thought in the minds of legislators wavering over green bills will be the second big obstacle to Mr Obama’s green ambitions: the state of the economy. The president-elect’s newly appointed chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, insists that the grim outlook is reason to press rather than postpone the green agenda: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” The notion that government spending on greenery will help lift America out of recession has become faddish. But there is little evidence to support it.

Ugh.

Green jobs not necessarily an easy fix

Interesting article in The Economist about the possibility of governments investing heavily in green technology, therefore boosting the demand for jobs (and the economy) while transforming the energy business. Interesting in that it reminds us that, "the easy notion that there is a single solution to the world’s economic and climatic problems is, thus, a dangerous one."

Green Collar Jobs to Revive the Economy?

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President-elect Barack Obama and his energy advisers have been making the case that a multibillion-dollar government investment in everything from wind turbines to a "smart" electrical grid is just what's needed to help revive the economy. The lure is millions of government-subsidized "green jobs."

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama argued that spending $150 billion over the next decade to boost energy efficiency would help create five million jobs. The jobs would include insulation installers, to make houses more energy-efficient, wind-turbine builders, to displace coal-fired electricity, and construction workers, to build greener buildings and upgrade the electrical grid.

Read the entire article here.

And on a similar note, I've been looking for a reason to post a link to Dayo Olopade's piece in The New Republic about the division of liberals along class lines due to the environmental movement. A few excerpts from Olopade's piece:

Class distinctions were bred into the green movement from the beginning, as elite families like the Roosevelts and Rockefellers backed early conservation efforts that generally privileged aesthetics over economics. The Sierra Club itself was at first a social organization that arranged outdoor adventures for its leisured members. In 1962, Rachel Carson (who grew up along the Allegheny River just north of Pittsburgh) published Silent Spring to expose the role of chemicals and industrial pollutants in the production cycle, promoting the defense-of-nature model that animates groups like the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club to this day. But, although Silent Spring talks extensively about factories, the seminal text makes virtually no mention of the people working inside them.

Labor groups in industries like logging or car manufacturing have spent years fighting the conservation agenda and blaming green victories like the Endangered Species Act for draining jobs in construction and development. By 1997, the AFL-CIO saw fit to campaign against U.S. adoption of the Kyoto Protocols, which it regarded as an economic albatross, and, in 2002, the Teamsters sided with conservative Republicans to push for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course, both groups have consistently endorsed and campaigned for Democrats throughout this period, and there have been occasional moments of synergy, as when greens and blues teamed up to push the Clean Air and the Occupational Health and Safety acts in the 1970s. But "it was easier to do that when the economy was booming," says Les Leopold, a labor historian and co-founder of the Public Health Institute. Since the rust belt began to tighten in the '80s, the character of the relationship has overwhelmingly been one of mutual mistrust and rivalry, with the greens viewed as hostile to the problems everyday people face.

Now green-collar jobs are providing an obvious incentive for compromise. The idea is to bring about the greening of the United States while restocking the beleaguered labor movement with good positions--in both traditional fields (such as building the storkish steel turbines that now dot Pennsylvanian hills) and new ones (like energy audits, efficiency retrofitting, and biofuel production).

Energy-Efficiency Good for Economy

A study conducted at the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley by economist David Roland-Holst found that:

"...while the state’s policies lowered employee compensation in the electric power industry by an estimated $1.6 billion over that period, it improved compensation in the state over all by $44.6 billion."

Furthermore:

"California's energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007, while eliminating fewer than 25,000, according to a study to be released Monday."

Read more here.